George Keats of Kentucky: A Life

Aftermath 1842-

183 afterMath 1842– The next two years were eventful. Georgiana, aged forty-five, married twenty-five-year-old John Jeffrey. Their motivations, aside from the possibility of real love, are lost to history. Some have speculated that his initial interest was in seventeen-year-old Isabel, before her mother stepped between them. Jeffrey moved into the Keats home on Walnut Street after their marriage on 5 January 1843. Georgiana may have been propelled to remarry by the memory of her own mother, a single parent living in shared lodgings with relatives under straitened circumstances. Jeffrey was a handsome , industrious Scottish engineer with good prospects. Shortly after their marriage (likely in 1843 or 1844), Jeffrey and Georgiana were caught up in an ugly marital spat. While Georgiana was pregnant with Jeffrey’s child, he traveled to Nashville, where he met a woman named Mrs. Barrow, presented her with a gift, and returned home with a warm thank-you note that Clarence Keats discovered. Georgiana confronted Jeffrey, who described Mrs. Barrow as “beautiful” and “pure.” Georgiana wrote a threatening letter to Mrs. Barrow, whose name she thought was “invariably coupled with some tale of scandal,” and this infuriated Jeffrey . He told her that if she ever visited Nashville, she would be “shuned by every person there, and if I [Georgiana] went into public I should be insulted.” A few weeks later, Mrs. Barrow wrote again to Jeffrey, who unaccountably and mistakenly handed the envelope to Georgiana. Mrs. Barrow had written some vaguely erotic and inarticulate prose about her love for him. After reading it, Georgiana miscarried and was bedridden for three weeks. Given that Georgiana’s last child, Alice Ann, had been born in 1836, when Georgiana was forty, hers was an at-risk pregnancy, and her emotional state was such that her doctor said “he could not ‘minister to a mind diseased.’” She wrote about all this in a bitter complaint (undated) to Jeffrey ’s brother Alexander.1 Evidently, Jeffrey’s travels kept him away from Nashville thereafter, and the affair died down. Isabel’s heart-rending death on 20 October 1843 added to the family’s 184 GeorGe Keats of KentucKy trauma. She died in the library from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, having aimed her brother John Henry’s shotgun at a spot between her heart and her neck. Isabel was described by the family as the brightest and most similar in appearance to the poet, and her death was a tragedy. Georgiana portrayed the event as an accident. George Dennison Prentice penned a poem to her: To a Poet’s Niece I know a little girl With spirit wild and free, And it ever seems a blessing With that pretty one to be— To mark her ringing shout And her ever joyous words Like anguishing of a fountain Or the cadence of the birds. That joyous little girl Is wild as a gazelle, Yet a poet’s name and lineage, Are thine, sweet Isabel. And although thy wild heart seemeth All heedless of the lyre, Within that young heart dwelleth The poet’s gift of fire. But ’twas a fearful gift To that noble child of song, Whose glorious name and lineage To thee, bright one, belong: For it turned his heart to ashes Where its centered light was flung, And he perished in his morning— The gifted and the young. Ay, he perished in the morning, That child of light and gloom, But he left a flame that glitters Like a star above a tomb; And I dream thou hast a genius 185 Aftermath: 1842– Like that which won his fame; Thou hast his name and features— And why not his soul of flame?2 Perhaps to make amends, Jeffrey took an interest in the Keats children, establishing decent relationships with John Henry and Ella and a trusting partnership with Clarence. And he was genuinely fond of Georgey. In Louisville, John Jeffrey read about Milnes’s plan to publish a Keats biography. Although George had abandoned his objections to Brown’s publishing a biography, Georgiana still had letters and several poems that were essential to Milnes’s work. Jeffrey wrote to Milnes on 13 May 1845 and again on 26 July 1845, providing a list of all the materials he was prepared to copy. Jeffrey noted at the conclusion of his July letter: “As to the profits arising from the sale of the work you...